How to be a good teacher - Web viewWhen you say you know a word, what different things do you know...

Teacher Development Pack

Vocabulary – Part 1.1What does it mean to know a word?Before reading ‘What does it mean to now a word?’ consider the following questions:

When you say you know a word, what different things do you know about it?

How many words do learners of English need to know?

Now read ‘What does it mean to know a word?’ and see if the author agrees with you.

ELT Forum – Vocabulary – Part 1.1 ©2002 Pearson Education Ltd. www.ELTForum.com

This extract originally published by

What does it mean to know a word?by Scott Thornbury from ‘How to teach Vocabulary’, Pearson Education 2002.

We have been talking about the importance of having an extensive vocabulary – that is, knowing lots of words. But what does it mean to know a word?At the most basic level, knowing a word involves knowing:

• its form, and• its meaning

If I tell you that there is, in Maori, a word that takes the form tangi, you can not really claim to say you ‘know tangi’ since you don’t know what tangi means. The form of the word tells you nothing about its meaning.So, what does tangi mean? Well, it means sound. But is that sound the noun, or sound the verb, as in to sound? In fact, it can mean both – so part of knowing the meaning of tangi is knowing its grammatical function. But tangi doesn’t mean only sound; it also means lamentation, dirge and to weep. In fact the waiata tangi (funeral lament) is an integral part of the tangihanga, or Maori funeral ceremony, so much so that tangi has come to mean (colloquially) simply funeral. But, of course, not a funeral in the European sense. A Maori tangi is a very different kind of ceremony. For a start … (and so on). In other words, knowing the meaning of a word is not just knowing its dictionary meaning (or meanings) – it also means knowing the words commonly associated with it (its collocations) as well as its connotations, including its register and its cultural accretions.Finally, we need to distinguish between receptive knowledge and productive knowledge. Now that you know the meaning of tangi you can probably make sense of the opening passage from the short story ‘Tangi’ by Witi Ihimaera:

Do not listen to the wailing, Tama. Do not listen to the women chanting their sorrows, the soaring waiata tangi which sings alone and disconsolate above the wailing. It is only the wind, Tama. Do not listen to the sorrows of the marae …

Assuming you understood tangi in this extract, you may still feel uncomfortable about working the word into a letter or dropping it into a conversation. (And so far you have only had its written form, not its spoken form.) In other words, you have receptive, but not productive, knowledge of the word. Receptive knowledge exceeds productive knowledge and generally – but not always – precedes it. That is, we understand more words than we utter, and we usually understand them before we are capable of uttering them.To summarise, word knowledge can be represented as in this diagram for the word tangi:

Of course, even a proficient speaker of Maori may not ‘know’ all these aspects of the word tangi: word knowledge is incremental and takes time. What is sometimes called a state of initial fuzziness seems to be an inevitable part of vocabulary learning.

The above diagram for the word tangi suggests that the way words are stored in the mind resembles less a dictionary than a kind of network or web. This is an apt image: the mind seems to store words neither randomly nor in the form of a list, but in a highly organised and interconnected fashion – in what is often called the mental lexicon.



The mistakes we make offer an insight into the way the mental lexicon is organised. For example, the speaker who says ‘I watched this Maori tango on television’ is confusing two words that are similar in form, if quite different in meaning: tangi and tango. This suggests that words with similar sound structure are closely interconnected, so that the search for one may sometimes activate its near neighbour. The comic effect of this kind of mistake (called a malapropism) has not been lost on writers, including Shakespeare:

bottom: ‘Thisbe, the flowers of odious savours sweet –’quince: ‘Odious’ – odorous!

As in a dictionary, similar forms seem to be located adjacent to each other. But if every time we ‘looked up’ a word in the mental lexicon, we started with its form, we would have to scroll through a great many similar-sounding but totally unrelated words: tandem, tangent, tangle, tango, etc. This would be very time-consuming. To speed things up, words are also interconnected according to their shared meanings – all the fruit words being interconnected, and all the clothing words interconnected too. So, if I want to say I had a delicious mango for breakfast, the lexicon activates the fruit department before triggering a search of words beginning with mang-. This accounts for the fact that, in experiments, subjects find that answering the first of the following two questions is easier and quicker than answering the second:

1 Name a fruit that begins with p.2 Name a word that begins with p that is a fruit.

In each case the word search simultaneously focuses on form and meaning, but it seems the brain is better disposed to begin the search via the meaning-based (thesaurus-like) lexicon than the form-based (dictionary-like) one. This also accounts for the fact that, once subjects have accessed the fruit category, they are able to find other fruits more quickly. All of this suggests a semantic (meaning-based) organisation, but one that also has a form-based (or what is called morphological) back-up. The two systems work in tango, sorry, in tandem. This explains why malapropisms (such as odious/odorous) are not only similar in sound to the intended word, but are almost always the same part of speech and often share aspects of their meaning. Hence, many learners of English confuse chicken and kitchen: not only do the two words sound alike, they are both nouns and they share elements of meaning in that they belong to the same lexical field.We can think of the mental lexicon, therefore, as an overlapping system in which words are stored as ‘double entries’ – one entry containing information about meaning and the other about form. These individual word entries are then linked to words that share similar characteristics, whether of meaning (mango/papaya) or of form (tangi/tango) – or both (chicken/kitchen). The number of connections is enormous. Finding a word is like following a path through the network, or better, following several paths at once. For, in order to economise on processing time, several pathways will be activated simultaneously, fanning out across the network in a process called ‘spreading activation’.Linked to this system are other areas of cognition, such as world knowledge (like an encyclopedia) and memory (like a personal diary or autobiography), so that activation of a word like tangi or mango or tango also triggers general knowledge and personal experiences that extend beyond the simple ‘dictionary’ meanings of these words. Knowing a word, then, is the sum total of all these connections – semantic, syntactic, phonological, orthographic, morphological, cognitive, cultural and autobiographical. It is unlikely, therefore, that any two speakers will ‘know’ a word in exactly the same way.

Knowing a word is one thing – but how is that knowledge acquired? In learning their first language the first words that children learn are typically those used for labelling – that is, mapping words on to concepts – so that the concept, for example, of dog has a name, dog.



Or doggie. But not all four-legged animals are dogs: some may be cats, so the child then has to learn how far to extend the concept of dog, so as not to include cats, but to include other people’s dogs, toy dogs, and even pictures of dogs. In other words, acquiring a vocabulary requires not only labelling but categorising skills. Finally, the child needs to realise that common words like apple and dog can be replaced by superordinate terms like fruit and animal. And that animal can accommodate other lower order words such as cat, horse and elephant. This involves a process of network building – constructing a complex web of words, so that items like black and white, or fingers and toes, or family and brother are interconnected. Network building serves to link all the labels and packages, and lays the groundwork for a process that continues for as long as we are exposed to new words (and new meanings for old words) – that is, for the rest of our lives.In what ways is the development of a second language (L2) lexicon any different from that of the first language (L1)? Perhaps the most obvious difference is the fact that, by definition, second language learners already have a first language. And not only do they have the words of their first language, but they have the conceptual system that these words encode, and the complex network of associations that link these words one with another. Learning a second language involves both learning a new conceptual system, and constructing a new vocabulary network – a second mental lexicon.Consider, for example, the problems I faced when learning Maori kinship terms:

The word teina is used by (1) a boy when speaking of his younger brother; (2) a girl when speaking of her younger sister. The word tuakana is used by (1) a boy when speaking of his older brother; (2) a girl when speaking of her older sister. The word tuahine is used by a boy when speaking of his sister. The word tungane is used by a girl when speaking of her brother.(from Harawira K, Teach Yourself Maori, Reed Books)

The cultural ‘distance’ between Maori and European conceptual systems is relatively large, but for most language learners there will be much more that is shared than is foreign. Even learning Maori, I did not have to relearn the concept of hand, for example, or of horse. The fact that the adult learner’s concept system is already installed and up-and-running, means that he or she is saved a lot of the over- and under-generalising associated with first language learning. An adult learner is unlikely to confuse a dog with a cat, for example.However, there is a downside to having a ready-made conceptual system with its associated lexicon. Faced with learning a new word, the second language learner is likely to short-cut the process of constructing a network of associations – and simply map the word directly onto the mother tongue equivalent. Thus, if a German-speaking learner learns the English word table, rather than creating a direct link from table to the concept of table, they are more likely to create a link to their L1 equivalent (Tisch). The L1 word acts as a stepping stone to the target concept.

Perhaps – in order to pre-empt an over-dependence on mental translation – learners should be advised to follow Christopher Isherwood’s advice:

When Christopher began giving English lessons, he would try to convey to his German pupils something of his own mystique about the German language. ‘A table doesn’t mean ein Tisch – when you’re learning a new word, you must never say to yourself it means. That’s altogether the wrong approach. What you must say to yourself is: Over there in England, they have a thing called a table. We may go to England and look at it and say “that’s our Tisch”. But it isn’t. The resemblance is only on the surface. The two things are essentially different, because they’ve been thought about differently by two nations with two different cultures. If you can grasp the fact that that thing in England isn’t merely called a table, it really is a table, then you’ll begin to understand what the English themselves are like … Of course, if you cared to buy a table while you were in England and bring it back here, it would become ein



Tisch. But not immediately. Germans would have to think about it as ein Tisch for quite a long while, first.’(from Christopher and His Kind, Eyre Methuen)

Isherwood is suggesting that the words table and Tisch are not synonymous – that their meanings do not map onto each other snugly. While this example may be a little far-fetched, it is true that the degree of semantic overlap between words in different languages can vary a lot. This is often a cause of lexical errors. A Spanish speaker who complains that her shoes make ‘her fingers hurt’ is over-generalising from Spanish dedo which means both finger and toe. Likewise, a German speaker who has left his ‘clock’ at home, may in fact mean his watch: Uhr stands for both clock and watch. Many cross-language errors are due to what are known as false friends. False friends are words that may appear to be equivalent, but whose meanings do not in fact correspond. Examples of false English friends for speakers of Polish, for example, are:

actually (aktualnie in Polish means ‘at present’, ‘currently’)apartment (apartament in Polish is a ‘hotel suite’)chef (szef is Polish for ‘chief’ or ‘boss’)dress (dres is Polish for ‘tracksuit’)history (historia in Polish means ‘story’)lunatic (lunatyk in Polish is a ‘sleepwalker’)pupil (pupil in Polish is a ‘pet’ or ‘favourite’)

Over-reliance on transfer from L1 could, conceivably, result in a Pole saying: ‘Tell the chef that actually there’s a lunatic in a dress in my apartment!’Generally speaking, however, languages that share words with similar forms (called cognates) have many more real friends than false friends. An Italian learner of English, for example, need not feel suspicious of the English word apartment (appartamento in Italian), nor garage (the same in Italian), garden (giardino), or balcony (balcone) – among thousands of others.As well as false friends and real friends, there are strangers: words that have no equivalent in the L1 at all, since the very concept does not exist in the learner’s lexicon. Supposedly Chinese has no equivalent for the English words privacy or community. In this case, the Chinese learner of English is in a position not dissimilar to a child learning his or her L1; they are learning the concept and the word in tandem. The way colour terms are distributed in different cultures is also a possible source of conceptual strangeness. Russian, for example, distinguishes between two kinds of blue: sinij vs goluboj, for which English has no satisfactory equivalents. But one needs to be careful not to read too much into such reported differences; like the Inuit’s one hundred different words for snow, they may in fact be language myths.By analogy with false friends, real friends and strangers, it may be the case that, for a good many second language learners, most of the words in their L2 lexicon are simply acquaintances. They have met them, they know them by name, they even understand them, but they will never be quite as familiar to them as their mother tongue equivalents. This is because the associative links in the second language lexicon are usually less firmly established than mother tongue links. To extend the metaphor: learning a second language is like moving to a new town – it takes time to establish connections and turn acquaintances into friends. And what is the difference between an acquaintance and a friend? Well, we may forget an acquaintance, but we can never forget a friend. (For more on remembering and forgetting, see below.)

A further major difference between first and second language vocabulary learning is in the potential size of the lexicon in each case. An educated native speaker will probably have a vocabulary of around 20,000 words (or, more accurately, 20,000 word families – see page 4). This is the result of adding about a thousand words a year to the 5,000 he or she had



acquired by the age of five. An English dictionary includes many more: the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, for example, boasts ‘over 80,000 words and phrases’, while the Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million entries. Most adult second language learners, however, will be lucky to have acquired 5,000 word families even after several years of study.This relatively slow progress has less to do with aptitude than with exposure. The average classroom L2 learner will experience nothing like the quantity nor the quality of exposure that the L1 infant receives. It has been calculated that a classroom learner would need more than eighteen years of classroom exposure to supply the same amount of vocabulary input that occurs in just one year in natural settings. Moreover, the input that infants receive is tailored to their immediate needs – it is interactive, and it is often highly repetitive and patterned – all qualities that provide optimal conditions for learning. By comparison, the average L2 learner’s input is, to say the least, impoverished. Given these constraints, how many words does the learner need to know?The answer must depend to a large extent on the learner’s needs. A holiday trip to an English-speaking country would obviously make different vocabulary demands than a year’s study in a British university. But is there such a thing as a threshold level – a core vocabulary that will serve in most situations? One figure that is often quoted is 2,000. This is around the number of words that most native speakers use in their daily conversation. About 2,000 words, too, is the size of the defining vocabulary used in dictionaries for language learners. These are the words and suffixes that are used in the dictionary’s definitions. Moreover, a passive knowledge of the 2,000 most frequent words in English would provide a reader with familiarity with nearly nine out of every ten words in most written texts. In this paragraph, for example, so far only the following words fall outside the top 2,000 words in written English: vocabulary (mentioned twice), threshold, core, quoted, native, dictionaries/dictionary’s, suffixes, definitions, moreover, passive, familiarity and paragraph. In other words, fourteen out of 140 running words, or exactly ten per cent of the text, would be unfamiliar to the learner who had learned the top 2,000.And very many of the words in the preceding paragraph – such as the, to, a, on, would, in, but, is, there, that, will and one – are extremely common indeed. In fact, it has been calculated that the most frequent 100 words in English make up almost fifty per cent of most texts. That is to say, a half of this book consists of merely 100 words!Of course, the majority of these 100 high frequency words are grammar – or function – words, such as has, to, did, she, were, etc., and not content words like answer, depend, large, extent, learner, needs, etc. On their own, as we saw in Chapter 1, function words have very restricted usefulness: try having a conversation with the ten most frequent words in written English: the, to, of, a, and, in, I, was, for, that!There is a strong argument, then, for equipping learners with a core vocabulary of 2,000 high frequency words as soon as possible. The researcher Paul Meara estimated that at the rate of 50 words a week (not unreasonable, especially if the emphasis is taken off grammar teaching) this target could be reached in 40 weeks, or one academic year, more or less. Of course, this is the minimum or threshold level. Most researchers nowadays recommend a basic vocabulary of at least 3,000 word families, while for more specialised needs, a working vocabulary of over 5,000 word families is probably desirable. Students aiming to pass the Cambridge First Certificate Examination (FCE), for example, should probably aim to understand at least 5,000 words even if their productive vocabulary is half that number.On the other hand, students preparing for academic study might be better off working from a specialised academic word list. A recently published academic word list consists of just 570 word families, covering a variety of disciplines – arts, commerce, law and science – and includes such items as analyse, concept, data and research. These 570 word families account for one in every ten words in academic texts. For example, the following words occurring in the paragraph we analysed above are covered in this academic list: core, quoted, passive and paragraph. Knowledge of this academic list (on top of the 2,000 most frequent



words in English) would have thus reduced the unfamiliar words in that paragraph to a mere ten.A preoccupation with vocabulary size, however, overlooks the importance of vocabulary depth. Vocabulary knowledge is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, that is, a case of either knowing a word or not knowing it. Consider, for example, these different degrees of ‘knowing’ in my own knowledge of Spanish, using words taken randomly from the Q section of the dictionary:

queso (cheese) can understand and produce it (both in speakingand writing) without effort

querer (want) can understand it and produce it, though need tothink about past irregular forms

quedar (stay) can understand it and produce it, but only in itsmain non-idiomatic senses

quirófano can understand it in context only, and can produce(operating theatre) it if prompted (e.g. with first letter) but not

confident about correct word stressquiebra can understand it in context only, and can’t produce(bankruptcy) it even if promptedquicio (hinge) probably wouldn’t understand it even in context,

and certainly can’t produce it

This suggests that, at the very least, estimates of vocabulary size must take into account productive and receptive knowledge. Then there is knowledge of spelling and pronunciation, of derivative forms and of different shades of meaning. Finally, there is the degree of control over word knowledge: is the word readily accessible, or does it require prompting? (Think of how you answer crossword clues: some words come only when several letters have been filled in; others require no prompting at all.) Again, these different aspects of ‘knowing’ suggest that the task of acquiring a functional lexicon is more complicated than simply memorising words from lists.In the end, however, exactly which words a learner needs to know is a very personal matter. It is not easy either to predict learners’ needs nor to ensure that the words that have been selected for teaching will be learned. Nor will there be time, especially in non-intensive language courses, for all the words that the learners need to be explicitly taught. A good part of vocabulary acquisition has to be incidental. Incidental learning is facilitated through exposure to language input, in the form of extensive reading, for example. Input from the teacher and from other learners is also an important resource for incidental learning (see Chapter 3).Most important of all, perhaps, is that the teacher encourages an enthusiasm for vocabulary acquisition, and provides learners with the strategies for self-directed learning – strategies that will be discussed in Chapter 9.



Now that you have read ‘What does it mean to know a word?’ complete the following tasks:

Look at the ‘tangi’ example. List the different things that ‘knowing’ a word means in the left-hand column, and explain them in your own words in the right-hand column.

Word knowledge Explanation

Jargon buster: explain the meaning of the following terms:

a initial fuzziness _____________________________b mental lexicon ______________________________c malapropism ______________________________d morphological ______________________________e labelling ______________________________f categorising ______________________________g network building ______________________________h false friends ______________________________i strangers ______________________________j acquaintances ______________________________k core vocabulary ______________________________l defining vocabulary ______________________________m content ______________________________n function ______________________________o depth ______________________________p productive ______________________________q receptive ______________________________

What two ways are words stored in the mental lexicon, and which usually starts a mental lexicon ‘search’?

In what ways does a learner’s L1 help or hinder their learning of words in the target language?

Using a foreign language that you know, can you make a productive – receptive word list like the author’s ‘queso’ – ‘quicio’ one?

ELT Forum – Vocabulary – Part 2 © 2002 Pearson Education Ltd.www.ELTForum.com


Vocabulary – Part 2Word Patterns

Before reading ’Word Patterns’ answer the following questions:

How do words occur in grammatical patterns? Give examples.

What are the implications for teaching of the fact that words occur in patterns.

Now read “Word Patterns”. How close were your answers to what the author has said?



Word Patternsby Susan Hutchinson

Susan Hutchinson sees the importance of teaching learners the way words work together.

What do the underlined phrases in these sentences have in common?

1 I never stopped loving him , but one day it didn’t seem right any more. (Magazine) 2 The Islamic invaders instructed the Europeans in mathematics and philosophy . (Non-fiction)

3 You think they have a chance of beating Australia? (Spoken)4 Professor Horne scoffed at the suggestion that dreams mean anything . (Journalism)

5 Trish was interested to notice how fast Terry sprang to his feet when she appeared. (Fiction)

6 Did you ever get angry with her for all this ? (Spoken)

In each case the phrase ‘belongs to’ one of the words in it (the word in red). For example, in loving him, the -ing form is used because it follows stopped; in the Europeans in mathematics and philosophy, the pattern of ‘noun + in + noun’ belongs to instructed; and in of beating Australia, the preposition of followed by an -ing form is used because it follows chance. Phrases such as these don’t occur at random, but because they are part of the way that stop, instruct or chance are used. We might say that all the underlined phrases in the sentences above are part of the ‘grammar’ of the words in red.

Identifying patternsIt is not only a few words, such as stop, instruct, chance and suggestion that behave in this way – in fact most words do. That is, most words are found in phrases made up of particular other kinds of words or clauses. These restrictions on how words are used are known as ‘patterns’. The pattern of stop, shown above, is ‘verb + -ing’. The pattern of instruct is ‘verb + noun + in + noun’. Chance has the pattern ‘noun + of + -ing’. Suggestion has the pattern ‘noun + that-clause’. The pattern of interested is ‘adjective + to-infinitive’; and the pattern of angry is ‘adjective + with + noun + for + noun’. (Words can have more than one pattern – stop, for example, can be used with a number of different patterns: stop someone; stop to do something; stop doing something; stop someone from doing something; or just stop!)

Before we look at the advantages for learners in being able to identify word patterns, you might like to raise your own awareness of the different patterns that words have. Try these exercises in identifying patterns.

1 Look at these two sets of sentences. Each sentence from the first set matches one from the second set in that the word in bold has the same pattern. Match up the two sets. (For example, sentence 1c matches 2a because in both the verb is followed by of and a noun – died of a heart attack and complained of a headache.)

1 a They’ve just banned bikes from the city.b He’s much more familiar with those kinds of issues than I am.c She died of a heart attack.d So you didn’t come to a conclusion as to how many different sentences there were.e I felt perhaps they would, you know, give more attention to the girls.

2 a She complained of a headache.b Let me just introduce you to the gentleman sitting behind you.c My mum’s never hidden anything from me.d Please give him some advice as to what to do.e Presumably the bank was also happy with the budget.



2 In this short extract, describe the pattern of each of the words in bold. (For example, want has the pattern ‘verb + noun + to-infinitive’.)

If you want us to give you a free quotation please telephone us on 700 6000 anytime. We will be pleased to make an appointment to call and see you. If you do not require our services, we apologise for troubling you. Just throw this leaflet away. We will not knock on your door.

Answers1 1a – 2c; 1b – 2e; 1c – 2a; 1d – 2d; 1e – 2b2 want – verb + noun + to-infinitive; give – verb + noun + noun; telephone – verb + noun; pleased – adjective + to-infinitive; appointment – noun + to-infinitive; require – verb + noun; apologise – verb + for + -ing; throw – verb + noun + adverb; knock –verb + on + noun.

Why do patterns matter to learners?

Probably for three reasons: patterns and meaning are linked, so knowing a pattern helps a learner to guess the meaning of a word; patterns are important to accuracy, and cause a lot of mistakes when they are mis-used; and knowing a word with its patterns encourages fluency. Let’s take each of these in turn.

Patterns and meaning.

When words share a pattern, they often share meaning as well. For example, the pattern ‘verb + at + noun’ is used with verbs meaning:

Speaking loudly and unpleasantly, egI just laughed at him.She just screamed at me.I shouted at her.She often snapped at him.She swore at her mum once.

Communicating with a facial expression or gesture, egThey’re all grinning at me.We just smiled at each other.You used to wave at me.He winked at them.

Looking at someone or something, eg Theo glanced at his watch.He kept glaring at me.Everybody looked at me.He noticed a man staring at him.

Giving a bad opinion of something, egOur mothers grumbled at wasting good food.A spokesman hit out at the tactics.The prime minister lashed out at his own government.The students protested at his decision.His opponents scoffed at the idea.

Other meanings include:



hitting or touching something: beat, grab, hack away, knock, pull, slash, stab, swing, tap, tearbiting, eating and drinking: chew, gnaw, nibble, nip, peck, pick, sip, suckattacking: aim, come, fire, fly, rush, shoothaving a size, level or weight: average out, bottom out, level off, peak, run, sell, stand, work out a few other verbs: guess, hint, point

(Information from Francis et al.)

Arranging these words in groups which share a meaning helps learners to make sense of and remember the pattern, because it shows that the verbs which are followed by at are not a random collection. It makes sense, then, when explaining vocabulary, to draw attention not just to the word itself, but to the word and its patterns. Learners can be encouraged to record vocabulary with patterns, and to form groups of their own. For example, a learner may notice that patterns with at often indicate aggression – laugh at, glare at, shout at and so on – or movements with eyes, face and hands – look at, smile at, wave at and so on.

Suppose the learner then meets some of these sentences:The boys scoffed at the girls and their romantic ideas.I was so miserable I snapped at the kids.He just glanced at the list.

A learner who does not know the meaning of scoff, snap or glance might guess the general meaning through the similarity with laugh at, shout at and look at.

Patterns and mistakes.

The second reason why it is important to draw learners’ attention to patterns is that they are the source of many mistakes. Even advanced learners, who may have mastered tenses, articles and other such mysteries, may be unaware of the patterns words have. Because pattern is linked to meaning, the teacher can use this fact in explaining the correction. Here are a few examples taken from essays written by very advanced learners of English:

Teachers discourage students to try to use the target language to express their own ideas.The verb discourage is not used with this pattern (though its opposite, encourage, is). The correct pattern is ‘verb + noun + from + -ing’, so this should be discourage students from trying… The teacher could point out that discourage is similar in meaning to stop and prevent, which have the same pattern.

Not all undergraduates are given the privilege to stay in university accommodation.The noun privilege is rarely used with this pattern (though the pattern It’s a privilege to meet you is common). Much more common is the pattern ‘noun + of + -ing’ (the privilege of staying). The nouns advantage, benefit, distinction, gift, honour, luxury and pleasure are also used with this pattern.

Teachers have the objective to help learners acquire natural English.Again, the noun objective does not have this pattern: it does have the pattern ‘noun + of + -ing’ (the objective of helping), along with aim, function, purpose and role.

Patterns and fluency.

The advantage for learners in knowing patterns as well as words is that not only is their speech more accurate, it is also likely to be more fluent. This is because if a word has been learnt with its pattern, the learner can produce, not just one word, but a series of words, a phrase, together. For example, here is a native speaker of English talking about his addiction to cigarettes:

My nan sometimes says to me that I get really moody when I don’t have a cigarette and I keep snapping at her she says but I try not to do it but I just keep doing it and then she gives me a cigarette.



Each of the verbs in this short extract has a pattern, which translates into a recognisable phrase:

say: verb + to + noun + that-clause (says to me that)get: verb + adjective (get really moody)have: verb + noun (don’t have a cigarette)keep: verb + -ing form (keep snapping; keep doing)snap: verb + at + noun (snapping at her)try: verb + to-infinitive (try not to do)do: verb + noun (do it; doing it)give: verb + noun + noun (gives me a cigarette)

Together, these phrases, which are not fixed but are not random either, make up a large proportion of the utterance. So, although a learner may never have heard or said keep snapping at her before, it can be produced without hesitation by putting together the pattern of keep (keep snapping) with the pattern of snap (snapping at her).

Patterns in the classroom.

Patterns, then, are important and useful, but they are also difficult for learners because they are so detailed. Learning about patterns means knowing about many different words. Some patterns have traditionally been the focus of grammar lessons (the difference between stop doing and stop to do or between remember doing and remember to do, for example). Now that we know that so many more patterns exist, the possibility of tackling all of them as teaching items becomes more remote.

A better plan is to consider making learners aware that words have patterns and that the patterns are meaningful. Often, awareness-raising exercises can be based on things that learners have read or listened to. For example, Willis and Willis suggest using the short text ‘Auto-pilot’ as the starting-point for consciousness-raising activities, and give some examples. The same text is given here with three sample exercises, focusing on the pattern ‘verb + noun + past participle’.

Auto-pilot

The flight ran several times a week taking holiday-makers to various resorts in the Mediterranean. On each flight, to reassure the passengers all was well, the captain would put the jet on to auto-pilot and he and all the crew would come aft into the cabin to greet the passengers.Unfortunately on this particular flight the security door between the cabin and the flight deck jammed and left the captain and the crew stuck in the cabin. From that moment, in spite of efforts to open the door, the fate of the passengers and crew was sealed.

Exercise 1Look at the underlined words: ‘the security door’ and ‘left the captain and the crew stuck in the cabin’. We can divide them up like this:

The security door

left the captain and the crew

stuck in the cabin

Now divide up these sentences and add them to the table:a) The masked men left her bound and gagged.b) A serious operation left her confined to a wheelchair.c) A childhood illness has left her crippled.d) The war left 300,000 homes destroyed.e) The bitter winds left many fishermen frozen to their seats.f) An earthquake killed around 170 people and left thousands homeless.

Look at what you have written in Column 1. What kind of things do these words describe? Look at what you have written in Column 4. What kind of things do these words describe?



Exercise 2In each of the following sentences, one word is missing.

Supply the correct word from this list:hidden outnumbered entertained charged fit surrounded

a) Our social life kept us and others ........................... .b) I kept myself .......................... all summer.c) She kept that world completely .......................... from her friends.d) He found himself .......................... by opposing players.e) Ray found himself .......................... with murder.

f) American soldiers found themselves hopelessly ...........................

Exercise 3Rewrite these sentences, using left, kept or found. a) Because the pilots went on strike, passengers were stranded at Gatwick.The strike left ..........................................................................................................

b) She always said that she was short of money because Dad didn’t give her enough.She always said that Dad kept ...............................................................................

c) She realised that someone had locked her out of the house.She found herself ...................................................................................................

Summary:

Patterns tell us the different ways that words are used, and knowing a word properly means knowing its patterns and the different things they mean.

Learners need to ‘know patterns’, but this knowledge is complicated. Rather than trying to teach all patterns, we might simply try to make learners aware of their existence and their importance. If learners can be taught to recognise patterns, and if teachers can use them when explaining mistakes, part of the problem of ‘sounding right’ or ‘sounding wrong’ in English might be solved.

Note The examples and concordance lines in this article are taken from the Bank of English, with acknowledgements to HarperCollins publishers and the University of Birmingham. Most examples have been taken from the spoken corpus of the Bank of English. Further details of the Bank of English can be found on http://www.cobuild.collins.co.uk.

Francis, G, Manning, E and Hunston, S Verbs: Patterns and Practice HarperCollins 1997Willis, D and Willis, J ‘Consciousness-raising activities in the language classroom’ in Willis, J and Willis, D (eds) Challenge and Change in Language Teaching Macmillan Heinemann 1996



Now that you have read “Word Patterns”, complete the following tasks:

Why are patterns important? (Give one example in each case.)

a Reason

An example

b Reason

An example

c Reason

An example

What do you think of the activities?

a Exercise 1

b Exercise 2

c Exercise 3

How would you extend each exercise so that students used the knowledge they have been working with?

ELT Forum – Vocabulary – Part 1.1 © 2002 Pearson Education Ltdwww.ELTForum.com

How to be a good teacher - Web viewWhen you say you know a word, what different things do you know...

Documents

Transcript of How to be a good teacher - Web viewWhen you say you know a word, what different things do you know...